It Grows On Trees

Courtesy of Distributorcap. This is too good not to share.

(1952) The Bushes are a typical happy American family trying to live on too little money. Mrs. Laura Bush acquires two mysterious trees that got into a nursery shipment by mistake. Guess what: they turn out to be money trees! After initial problems, Laura decides to spend the money. But there's one logical consequence of money grown on trees that no one's considered.

What the Bushes didn't consider was that the money picked off those trees would crumple and die, since it was really just a living part of the tree. As usual, anything a Bush touches just dies.

And like leaves on those money trees, George Bush picks the Lincolns, Jacksons, Hamiltons and Franklins as quickly as he can. He then spends those precious (and short lived) leaves on projects and programs that do nothing but contribute to health of companies like Bechtel, Halliburton and Blackwater, while marching the American economy to a death by a thousand budget cuts.

Today, the Hemorrhoid disguised as a President released the details of those 3.1 trillion leaves in his (hopefully) final budget. And guess what – there were NO surprises. Can anyone guess what the big winner was? I will give you a hint -- it wasn’t kids, education, energy, health care or the environment. Ok, One more, think five-sided building in Virginia. Think a giant rake.

At least Bush is going green – they didn’t print this piece of garbage on paper – you have to go online and print it out yourself. At least it is a clean budget. The final Bush exercise in creative accounting buys the Pentagon a bigger Hoover vacuum cleaner – we get a dust-free 7.5% increase in military suck for more overblown projects, $400 toilet seats, and of course the endless Iraqi abyss. Remember how ExxonMobil earned revenues of $469 billion in 2007. Ha! that is just a mere bag of shells compared to the US DOD. The Pentagon surpasses that with $515 billion. So not only can the Pentagon buy Belgium, they can get that paradise on the Indus River, Pakistan, as well.

And while the Pentagon gets 7.5% more, the rest of government will just have to go begging for paper clips and limousines. Of course one area that didn’t suffer the Bush chainsaw was combating illegal immigration. That will get an increase of 17 percent. The Energy Department will get $21 billion for nuclear weapons development. Health care for kids through S-CHIP, not one wooden nickel.

To pay for the Pentagon’s largesse, something’s gotta give. Say goodbye to 47 programs in education including the elimination of such “welfare” as encouraging arts in schools, bringing low-income students on trips to Washington and providing mental health services. Also the Decider has decided to eliminate the $283 million (not billion) federal program to help people make their homes more energy efficient and would cut energy aid to poor households by $500 million. Those two programs are less than 1.5% of the Pentagon’s budget. The lower economic rungs of society will just have to get used to being cold while being safe. Of course, they could just buy more Chinese made gloves and hats.

The budget also requests deep cuts in many popular domestic programs such as highway funds and other projects to develop renewable energy sources. It also failed to include any provisions after this year for keeping the incredibly nasty and expensive alternative minimum tax (AMT), originally aimed at the wealthy, from hitting millions of middle-class taxpayers. The AMT is nothing more than a big shell game --- any tax cut you might have saved from Bush gets eaten up by the AMT. What a Robin Hood that Bush is -- robs Peter to pay Halliburton.

And as a final kick-in-the-ass to an aging population, the budget includes $178 billion in cuts to Medicare over the next 5 years.

And under the guise of a policy “why look a gift horse in the mouth” this piece of economic toilet paper fails to include the full costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Mr. Commander Guy knows that the easiest part of his incredibly hard job is to march over to only bank left in the US with easy lending policies -- the Bank of PelosiReid and request the needed Iraq War funds -- outside budgetary approval. After all, CEO Nancy is a girl who just can’t say no!

Remember this word -- surplus [sur-pluhs, -pluh s]. Well Bush got rid of those in 2001, but back in 2004 he “claimed” the deficits would get smaller and return to a suplus before he left office. Well today, the douchebag said the deficit would reach a near-record level of $410 billion for the budget year 2008 and stay at a flat $407 billion for fiscal 2009. That is $817 billion for two years – gee now Mexico can buy us!

"The budget protects America and encourages economic growth. Congress needs to pass it," Bush said after meeting with his Cabinet. Bush also said despite the worsening near-term deficit, it would still be possible to balance the budget by 2012, while making permanent tax cuts he made in 2001 and 2003. What Bush failed to say is that he literally passing this economic time bomb to the next president, who will have to deal with the repercussions of such disastrous management.

So we have an increase in governmental spending, by deficit financing and lower governmental revenues by cutting taxes --- I am no economist, but is there something fundamentally ass-backward with this logic?

Bush’s 8 years of budgets have been nothing other that one giant earmark for his friends. The national debt (which for the most part is being financed by those purveyors of poison pet food and toys – China) has increase by nearly 2/3 to over $9 trillion from January 2001. The dollar is worthless abroad. Oil is nearing $100 barrel, gold $1000/ounce. Who's better off now than back in 2008. The CEOs of failed banks are.

While the usual Republican lemmings welcomed the budget (they would welcome the budget even if it meant they would have to be castrated), New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, the senior Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, showed he was somewhat willing to keep his balls, by saying “it lacked credibility.”

"This budget must have been viewed by them more as an academic exercise than a serious exercise because it's not a serious budget," Gregg told Reuters in an interview. "There are even more games than usual."

The bigger deficits, caused by a combination of weakening revenues and soaring costs in Iraq, would reverse a trend of the past three years in which annual deficits declined. I guess the Chimpinator figures since he is leaving he might as well go out with one helluva party.

Let’s not forget the Pelosi-Boner $150 billion stimulus package of tax rebates to jolt the economy will also add to the deficit. You want job security in these times of troubles --- become a manufacturer of money presses. But I would bet my entire stimulus check those machines are ALL made in China.